The Beginning of Radical Empiricism

Empiricisms ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 289-305
Author(s):  
Barry Allen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Pure Experience

William James introduced the expression “radical empiricism.” The chapter explains what was supposed to make empiricism radical, and why James thought that was worth trying to do. That requires explaining the connection between radical empiricism and other themes in James’s work, including pluralism and the idea of pure experience. His work belongs to an effort from the latter nineteenth century to make empiricism more consistently empirical by overcoming the legacy of Ockham and nominalism, and it is this anti-nominalist animus that radicalizes James’s empiricism.

Motivating Metaphysics: From Radical Empiricism to Process

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-38
Author(s):  
Russell J. Duvernoy
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Pure Experience

This chapter explores motivations for speculative thinking in terms of the respective risks of certainty and creativity. Following their interests in thinking conditions of novelty and creativity, both Whitehead and Deleuze challenge Kantian meta-philosophical criteria that privilege apodictic certainty. The chapter then explores how such speculative thinking has historical roots in William James’ radical empiricism and especially the concept of pure experience. It shows how Whitehead’s diagnosis of the “bifurcation of nature” arising out of inconsistent commitments to metaphysical materialism and epistemic empiricism is refigured through radical empiricism. Finally, it raises the possibility of a realism that does not presume the necessary locus of a constituted metaphysical subject.

Experiencia, realidad y verdad en el pragmatismo. Entre William James y Henri Bergson

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 121-141
Author(s):  
Alberto Villalobos Manjarrez
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Decisive Influence

The aim of this work is to explore the relations between the concepts of experience, reality and truth in the philosophy of William James, through a dialogue with Henri Bergson, a decisive influence for the pragmatist. This text is divided into five parts: 1) a brief introduction to the problem; 2) the development of the concept of experience in James philosophy; 3) the explanation of the concept of reality in this radical empiricism; 4) the exposition of three forms of truth that correspond to antiquity, modenity and pragmatism; 5) and, finally, a brief conclusion about the posterities and the actuality of this empirical philosophy.

scholarly journals Dissociation and the Unconscious Mind: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Mediumship

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-596
Author(s):  
Carlos S. Alvarado
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
History Of ◽  
Memory States ◽  
Hippolyte Taine ◽  
Unconscious Mind

There is a long history of discussions of mediumship as related to dissociation and the unconscious mind during the Nineteenth Century. After an overview of relevant ideas and observations from the mesmeric, hypnosis, and spiritualistic literatures, I focus on the writings of Jules Baillarger, Alfred Binet, Paul Blocq, Théodore Flournoy, Jules Héricourt, William James, Pierre Janet, Ambroise August Liébeault, Frederic W.H. Myers, Julian Ochorowicz, Charles Richet, Hippolyte Taine, Paul Tascher, and Edouard von Hartmann. While some of their ideas reduced mediumship solely to intra-psychic processes, others considered as well veridical phenomena. The speculations of these individuals, involving personation, and different memory states, were part of a general interest in the unconscious mind, and in automatisms, hysteria, and hypnosis during the period in question. Similar ideas continued into the Twentieth Century.

Emerson's Rhetoric of War

Prospects ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 293-320
Author(s):  
Michael Lopez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
William James ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Brute Fact ◽  
Individual Author ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Sea Wave

Recent literary theory has questioned the way we look at a text as the product of an individual “author.” But for William James—who was, like Emerson, a thoroughly nineteenth-century mind-any utterance, even the most complicated philosophical system, was at bottom the expression of the personality of the author. The history of philosophy, James believed, was in essence the “clash of human temperaments,” and temperament seems to gravitate to either the “idealistic” or what James denned as the “materialistic” pole:Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution, materialism by another.… [I]dealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our personal selves. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are least afraid of. To say then that the universe is essentially thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all. There is no radically alien corner, but an all-prevading intimacy. … That element in reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there because it calls forth powers that he owns-the rough, harsh, sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the democratizer-is banished because it jars too much on the desire for communication. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think, always be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on the reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we can act with; others, on the capacity of brute fact that we must react against.

scholarly journals London Eyes: William Dean Howells and the Shift to Instant Photography

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Movements ◽  
The Way

Owen Clayton, "London Eyes: William Dean Howells and the Shift to Instant Photography"(pp. 374––394) Toward the end of the nineteenth century, one of William Dean Howells's many avid readers, finally meeting him in the flesh, expressed surprise that the famed writer was not dead. Although he had not actually departed from the world, it was true that by this time the venerable "Dean"was at a low ebb. While younger authors were taking the novel in directions about which he was, at the least, ambivalent, Howells was aware that his own best work was behind him. Yet, throughout his career, he maintained a desire to test different literary approaches. In England in 1904, Howells tested a conceit that would allow him to keep pace with the literary movements of the day. This consisted of an extended photographic metaphor: an association of himself with the Kodak camera. He used this figuration to move beyond the philosophical foundations of his previous work. Criticism has largely overlooked this endeavor, which Howells buried away in the somewhat obscure travelogue London Films (1905). This essay shows how London Films used its photographic metaphor to question positivistic observational assumptions, the way in which this was a response to William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), and, finally, why Howells ultimately went back on his attempt to create a Kodak school in fiction.

ORNAMENT AND DISTRACTION: PERIPHERAL AESTHETICS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-255
Author(s):  
Alison Georgina Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Related Phenomenon ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Optical Character ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

In the section devoted to “Attention”inThe Principles of Psychology(1890), William James describes how the “‘adaptation of the attention’” can alter our perception of an image so as to permit multiple visual formulations (417). In his example of a two-dimensional drawing of a cube, we can see the three-dimensional body only once our attention has been primed by “preperception”: the image formed by the combination of lines has “no connection with what the picture ostensibly represents” (419, 418). In a footnote to this passage, however, James uses an example from Hermann Lotze'sMedicinische Psychologie(1852), to show how a related phenomenon can occur involuntarily, and in states of distraction rather than attention:In quietly lying and contemplating a wall-paper pattern, sometimes it is the ground, sometimes the design, which is clearer and consequently comes nearer. . .all without any intention on our part. . . .Often it happens in reverie that when we stare at a picture, suddenly some of its features will be lit up with especial clearness, although neither its optical character nor its meaning discloses any motive for such an arousal of the attention. (419)James uses the formal illogicality of the wallpaper (its lack of compositional center prevents it from dictating the trajectory for our attention according to intrinsic aesthetic laws) to demonstrate the volatility of our ideational centers, particularly in moments of reverie or inattention. Without the intervention of the will, James says, our cognitive faculties are always in undirected motion, which occurs below the strata of our mental apprehension. Momentary instances of focus or attunement are generated only by the imperceptible and purely random “irradiations of brain-tracts” (420). Attention, for James, is the artistic power of the mind; it applies “emphasis,” “intelligible perspective,” and “clear and vivid form” to the objects apprehended by the faculties of perception, it “makesexperience more than it is made by it” (381). Reverie, a moment when attention has been reduced to a minimum, thus demands an alternative aesthetic analog, where composition is reduced to a minimum too.

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